Installing Debian GNU/Linux Using debootstrap

“Most Debian GNU/Linux neophytes find that distribution’s default installer a bit difficult and ugly. While developers are working on a new installer for Debian Etch, there is a fully baked command-line alternative today: debootstrap. Debootstrap creates a basic Debian installation, and can also be used for creating custom, minimal installations on embedded systems or for replacing a pre-installed Linux distribution with Debian on a co-located server.”

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When I got this thinkpad, the hardware was too new for the debian sarge installer. I wanted to use Kanotix with debootstrap to manually install a Sid system. Too bad, the version of debootstrap present on the Kanotix CD was too old to be able to download a current minimal Sid system, so it has not worked.

This article suggests downloading the current version of debootstrap directly from the internet. I wish I weren’t so stupid to think of that …

Anyway this article is a very great source of information. I will use it in the future for sure.

Especially the new Debian installer, with its alternative GUI, is as good as any other GNU/Linux installer. Installation is often not the real problem with Debian, but what about configuration?

Not really related to debootstrap, but anyway:

What Debian needs, IMHO, are better configuration tools. Although some configuration taks may be easy and painless with Debian, some other tasks can be a real pain and may make configuring Debian a long and *very” frustrating process. While many other GNU/Linux distributions may take care of most configuration tasks already in the installation, Debian often leaves that to the user and makes things like configuring printers, home network, firewalling, scanners, sound, multimedia etc. a bit too difficult for average joe.

And if you install/configure Debian using its testing release (quite many of us do just because the new installer is so much better than the old one), you may also find that there are some odd bugs making configuration ever more difficult and frustrating. (That’s why I would nowadays advice people to use the stable release when installing Debian and then maybe upgrade from there to testing/unstable, just to avoid odd problems)

Porting SUSE’s YAST to Debian (or developing something like it) might be a good idea. I think that Debian needs some such integrating configuration tools in order to make it more userfriendly and coherent instead of just being a loose collection of various sorts of software only being integrated together by Debian’s package management. So – installing Debian and all its software, is not the problem, but configuration may be.